


[Meta] Episode 4.01 ("Aloha Ke Kahi I Ke Kahi")

by wanderlustlover



Series: Hawaii Five-0 Season Four Meta [2]
Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Based on a Tumblr Post, F/M, Gen, Meta, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-26
Updated: 2014-11-26
Packaged: 2018-02-27 01:58:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2674622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderlustlover/pseuds/wanderlustlover
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An attempt at the beginning of S4 to meta, before S4 cratered hard and I couldn't write anymore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	[Meta] Episode 4.01 ("Aloha Ke Kahi I Ke Kahi")

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alemara](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alemara/gifts).



Okay, so this is the write-up I’ve been promising since last weekend, and it’s going to have a read-more cut shortly. I know some of you are only here for the lols, the shirtless boys, your character or your ship and you don’t want to read about someone going on and on about canon consistency, literary storytelling arcs, realism and what not. 

Hey, I’m not here to harsh your buzz or judge you. 

So feel free to scroll and pay me, and my passion for this show, the same respect. 

For everyone else, who has been waiting and asking, please feel free to sit down, strap yourself in, pick up the white curtesy phone, and we’ll talk about things I only barely started talking about in subject-specific write-ups at the end of Season Three. 

Respectful conversations in agreement or disagreement are welcome and encouraged. There will be no so called fandom hate, bickering, yelling, name calling and/or retribution acknowledged in response to this. Pick your poison or your glitter filled cupcakes as you please, your mileage may vary. 

"Aloha kekahi i kekahi" (We Need One Another)

I really, really loved the beginning of this episode. It was amazingly tight, well written, and had amazing guest appearances, including cameo’s by almost all of the secondary and tertiary characters of the cast. For twelve minutes and fifty seconds.

Before the first impossible thing happened. And then it sort of dipped, wobbled and caught its balance. 

But then by twenty-three minutes it was gone for good again, because the impossible was reigning. 

I’m going to take you through the three levels of my thoughts on this: The good, the bad, and the ugly.

**The Good**

Main Characters — Steve, Danny, Chin, Kono 

Steve & Danny are so far off my happy docket this week it makes me dizzy to even look that way. I’m not sure how to countenance most of what either did as anything more than being drastically out of character post the willing-surrender in The Palace. I didn’t entirely mind Danny’s filterless conversation in the basement, though I agree with Steve’s expression about what-the-hell-is this now. 

I’m also still very hands off anything Gabby since that relationship still doesn’t have a canon existance anywhere but the last episode of last season. (Especially since I’m still holding it against her, she waited sixteen hours, according to the writing, to inform him she wasn’t going to be there. Sorry, shoddy writing, official canon, tiny grudge about treating your boyfriend and his daughter like they didn’t deserve your respect in the slightest. Before coming home as though she was a fool to pick her job over a nonexistent relationship.)

I have some massive problems with Danny pieces, Steve pieces and Danny & Steve pieces addressed in later sections of this write-up. Because I’m trying to keep the good part of this in The Good Box. Along with things like HEY! Guys, we got to see the inside of The Palace, finally, and now we know HQ is on the second floor, and there are crazy gorgeous stairs and entry ways on level one. 

Chin in a MF badass this week, pretty much all over the board. Pulling off some awesome saves, sneaking, distracting and fighting all over. I was very glad to see more of a fight-scene roll being given to Chin, and I was not disappointed on him delivering in the slightest. I’m sad he didn’t have any direct plot, but I’m ecstatic that I saw more of Chin *and* Kono in this one episode than I think I did in the first two or three episodes starting off Season Three.

Kono, I was inanely happy to see front and center. While I still have problems with her choosing a guy over her career (in the episode where two different women were picking a guy over a job, like it was a forgone conclusion), that said, if anyone was going to change their life on a dime, by the dictates of their heart and will, I’d believe it of Kono before anyone else. (The kid decided to re-invent herself once already and she rocked it to the max. If anyone could, people.) 

I was incredibly happy with pretty much the entire first Kono & Adam scene. Romeo & Juliet still rock my world. With her quiet stoicism toward the (perfect, perfect, perfect) best friend comment, and his falling apart about his brother, whom he still loves even if he killed him, even if he was a bad guy and blackballing Kono. Her comforting him about it, and getting the multifaceted nature of the situation and his grief (and, god, weren’t they just beautiful, too?).

While I find the way the two (three? four?) plots were connected preposterous, I am still looking forward to more Adam & Kono in the future of the show. I better not have any eight episode waits on them. Tell me the awesome story of them running, jumping, kicking ass, narrowly avoid death and being madly in love with each in Asia. Kono can totally be my leading lady any day. 

Secondary Characters — Max, Kamekona, Catherine 

Oh, oh, see this is part of what made me love the first twelve minutes. 

We had awesome guest appearances everywhere. We had Steve, Danny, Chin, the Adam-Kono peek-a-boo, and then Kamekona and a cop-in-training scene, that was perfect and which rocked my world. And then there was Max. I felt like I was literally in the middle of a homecoming for everyone I’d missed being totally awesome, awkward, amazing, completely the them I’d missed them being all over the board all summer in my dry spell. 

Catherine…can’t be covered here, not because I’m annoyed with her this week, but because I have issues with the convenient setup of her writing twice over, and I tackle the military-police tack of it in the next section, and her dramatic characterization shift in the third section of this. 

Extras’s This Week — Captain Grover, Toast, Wo Fat 

Toast. I am never ever ever ever sorry to see. 

I love having Toast and wish we could have a little more of him every time we get a small taste.

In opposition to my Steve & Danny (& Duke) issues that you’ll see below, I ended up massively rooting for Grover this episode. Which I did not expect, because of the massive cliche to his introduction (which I’ll talk about later, too). But, somehow, I was in love with him. From the moment he started talking, probably because he’s the only sane man in a world of loons (which is backwards from how he’s supposed to be the stick in the mud to Steve’s rule breaking [while Steve is backed up by every Five-0 member and the HPD chief]). 

Still, though. I’m so in Grover’s corner. You should give it to them all, Grover. Steve deserved at least an arrest for two or three things he did, if not the continual stripping of his position for the less and less sane decisions he’s making, that he never would have a season ago. But we lost Dennings existing mostly shortly after Lori, so come fill those shoes again, giving him hell. I hope we have a long run of you being the sane one in these scenes.

I always love Wo Fat. Amazing subtle actor, even when he has so little to work with. I’m still voting brother, even though I could care less at this point. Especially with the disappointing news that they are retiring the Wo Fat storyline (and iconic nemesis set up) for the foreseeable future. Part of me wants to hope they can pull gold out of their ass and make it a show stopping answer, worthy of making the blood test a red herring, but I have so little faith left in Lenkov now adays.

* * *

**The Bad (/Awkward)**

Okay, lets cover the cliche’s I really didn’t love, but was expecting, so they were more like pebbles in my shoe than things that made clutch my heart or start screaming. 

First we have Video Game/Superman!Steve from the first scene which was very clearly, as my cohort put it, a first person shoot ‘em up scenario no one would have made it through. I’m sorry, but no. Steve is super. But real life isn’t a video game and three people bent on killing you and anyone else in their way wouldn’t wait for you to kill them first, no hesitate shooting in your direction long enough to die. 

I love Steve. I’m pretty open about how Steve is my favorite character (with the necessary contingent of him being balance out with Danny and his whole team), but I don’t ever want a literal Superman!Steve. Yes, I like that he’s a badass, but I also like that half the time it comes with him being a meat-head and being drug around by his hand when it comes to emotions or family. I like a human balance of strengths and deficits. 

Please see the just surfaces deleted scene of 3.03, because that makes me INSANELY HAPPY. I love seeing a real clip where Steve has physical limitations and has to rest/has to share the burden of doing an arduous task with Danny/another person on his team. That’s so much more realistic than telling me Steve can storm the world and take them all on by himself all the time. 

And yet we had a whole world of Superman!Steve this whole episode, while he ran around doing things Steve of S1 and S2 never would have done. Ever. You don’t release hostages. You don’t torture assailants. And you don’t have the whole of Five-0 and HPD back him up in doing it, instead of standing in opposition to him and reminding him to be more human and humane by being his markers for humanity and rightness.

*

Second, we have The Kidnap Cliche, which I am so tired of. Everyone is getting kidnapped all the time in this show. You cannot impress me with the most convenient of cliché kidnappings when every other person in Steve’s life has been kidnapped and we’ve already been put through that with him, too. Because Kono, Mary Ann, Danny (and Grace), and Chin have all been kidnapped out from under him, and he’s had equally evocative reactions to all of them being taken. 

Where he’s willing to turn on the system, beat the crap out of people, ends up close as he can to literally flipping his shit, storms off with great plans and even greater numbers of large guns. He does it all the time. He does it every season. He does it with new people and old people, with team people and romance people and family people. It’s not new, it’s not evocative and it’s not a love scene. I’m sorry, but no. 

This trope is dead and dead and dead even more in Catherine’s hands for reasons I’ll discuss in Part 3.

*

Third, we have The Adversary Cliche because, apparently, Lenkov just hasn’t gotten enough of this one, even though it was what he used to push in Lori and it’s what Dennings whole characterization was based on from the moment he replaced Governor Jameson. On the fact Steve was was too devil may care and needed keeping in line. 

So first we had Dennings, Dannings-throught-Lori, then more Dennings. All of whom we won over by Steve. The first through her heart (and adopting her into the Five-0 family), the second by narrowly saving him fro a terrible case (in a season he didn’t exist in either). So obviously we need to fill those shoes again….by, what, seriously, are we not even changing up anything other than the details of what police branch the guy works for works for?

(Though to be honest, Grover is still probably my favorite thing about this episode. 

That man is true blue, and he was better than Steve, Five-0 [who all supported or stood by Steve’s crazy this time], *and* Duke in this episode. I want to give Grover a standing ovation, because everything that came out of his mouth was the right thing and he was the only person who sounded sane about the actions that were being taken around him.)

Because the prediction is predictable? We all know how this will go. They’ll fight for half the season, or the season, or a season and a half (if by some miracle this show continues), and then Steve will magically win him over or have to save him some how. I’m sorry, it’s just how it goes, and how it’s already been going for two seasons. I just have absolutely no reason to think it will go otherwise anymore. 

*

Fourth — non-cliche last two, but they go in the awkward bubble — Excuse me, but in what world would Danny only barely wince about losing his car? I cannot even handle the loss of the camaro and I saw it first a week ago in the spoilers thing that did not warn for that being in there suddenly. 

The car that is coming is hot, yes. I like cars as much as the next girl, but it is not Danny William’s car. It is not the car of the guy who is a careful, always remember the back up, cop and the man who has fathere of the best daughter in the world embossed on his heart, and like’s something a little racy but ultimately more dependable than sexy. 

The black car is not any of them, and like all the guest appearances and sudden soap storyline, it’s being foisted on the show. I really hope killing the most iconic car on the show was worth the paycheck, Lenkov. I don’t know any other show that would ever shoot itself in the foot like you’ve done there. 

*

Fifth, Catherine’s CO cannot assign her to a police matter. End of Argument. 

No seriously. Everything anyone can say beyond this line is entirely null and void. Steve & Her Co go way back and the whole world knows she gets sex for favors, because she laughed about that on national tv? That’s fine. (Actually it’s really not. On any level. But.) Her CO still cannot assign her to a police matter, or a live crime scene/hostage situation. That’s what SWAT and HPD are for. It’s the reason they are on the scene. 

Pearl-Hickam, Catherine’s Unnamed CO, and Catherine get no say or action in this. 

The military and the police force very specifically do not work together in this manner anywhere.

This is the drastic problem with introducing a character whose genesis is “girlfriend” and not “part of the plot who becomes important enough to be a girlfriend.” Consider her introduction in comparison to Jenna, Lori, Malia, Gabby. Jenna and Lori both come in with plot, Jenna’s on the trail of revenge and her fiancé. Lori is thrust in by the first use of The Adversary Clich in S2. While Malia and Gabby, and Cath for two seasons, are extra scenes with a love interest that don’t pertain to plot.

The problem being it’s almost impossible to move from the one to the other. We have no justifiable entry point for Catherine to be in our kickass scenes and plot logically, without the writers breaking the realism of The Navy or the Hawaii Police Force, or Both. Which is happening with great regularity as often as the show feels like it now for Cath. She used to have a reason to be there when she was giving him information, but she doesn’t now that she isn’t and she’s still just there. 

Also, for the sake of realism people, whose CO shows up on the beach where they are running, in their uniform? Whose boss actually tracks them down across an island, to tell you your significant other, who is entirely capable of handling himself and at a rank likely above both of you, is having an emergency, instead of just taking the two seconds to calling you or letting the professionals handle the job before bringing in the family members/civilians? This, too, is a bad writing no all over the board.

 

**The Ugly**

Welcome to the ugly. I consider these the worst, garish, gauche, horrible things that happened or did not happen in my episode, that are like blinding blinking lights that daze me into utter confusion or disgust that makes me want to wander in circles and ask how theses people made it out of kindergarten and into the well paying world of Hollywood.

1\. WHERE THE BLOODY HELL IS MY FONG UPDATE? 

Are you telling me that one of the tertiary members of this team was stabbed to the badly wounded and might-be-in-danger-of-dying state in your cliffhanger, and then nobody ever cared again? Is he still dying somewhere? Is he patched up in a hospital while your merry band of Will-Do-Whatever-You-Want-Them-To-Even-If-Its-OOC is busy out there, not even having a word to say on the subject? 

Malia got a better season 3 premiere answer and you fridged her on the spot, and spent the whole season with her removed from the memory of her own husband. 

 

Kay. I’m breathing a little more. But that is not okay. 

You cannot use people/characters as meat-puppets to ratchet up your cliffhanger tensions about how many people are in danger of dying in the next ten or twenty minutes, and then just not care about the answer, or whether they live, unless you want me to think all your characters don’t care, too. But it keeps happening.

I’m so so so so done with Lenkov’s cliffhangers. With Rachel and Grace in the airport. With Kono downing and Malia Injured. With how anyone who is not in Steve’s Scene in the cliffhanger getting storyline-shafted in the following season premiere episode. This is Not how you handle the fall down from your cliffhanger. It’s shoddy and badly written and it does not pay as much attention to anyone who is not Steve, Cath, Doris, or Wo Fat for 3 seasons running.

1-B. On a smaller missing person’s note — one I don’t care about personally, but drastically do stylistically where it comes to balanced stories — I’m pretty sure you sent off Adam & Kono with Doris, and that Grace’s scenes for early Season 4 were filmed right at the end of the Season 3 filming season to make way for baby. Or whatever the reason was. But we definitely knowing the filming was happening then. And I definitely know Doris was captain of the good ship lollypop taking the lovers away to safe harbor. 

So, Adam and Kono left on a boat with Doris who is, also, just magically gone, and no one mentions her at all when it’s not about the events in 3.01 (for letting Wo Fat live) or 3.24 (for coming to visit him before Steve did). Seriously? That’s how your vanishing act of Doris is going down, too? Like no one on the planet would notice you vanished the person you shoved in our faces nearly every episode of the last season as the Super Spy Mom.

No calls, no curiosity, no one mentions she was alive, or asks how she did getting them away, or where she swanned off to? Really? Even Steve has forgotten he was just a day ago demanding answer from her directly and calling this “To be Continued”? How is that reliable, good writing either? Oh, right. It isn’t. 

*

2\. Aka The Worst Thing in This Episode (for Me) 

Excuse me, you let Steve do what? 

I vaguely got — even if massively disapproved even more on the part of his counterpart — of the stint with the bomb under the guys’ head in Korea. Okay? Because Steve is rattled lightbulb that sometimes shines with the power of the sun and sometimes doesn’t come on the right way only sputtering sane blinks randomly, but he’s got twenty years of PTSD and he’s dealing/re-dealing with loss of his longest friend/only ‘family member’ he’s had since the age of 15 over the “newly” mutilated bones of that person. 

It’s not right, it still amounts to inhumane war crimes, but I can tell you just how easy that situation could make a man with 20 years of PTSD lose his shit *everywhere*. 

You do not — I will repeat DO NOT EVER — get to convince me Steve is allowed to shoot a bullet through the body of a man he just got to the point of staying alive to take down a different opponent. You do not get to convince me Steve and Danny will discuss this willful injury and torture of a captured assailant being shot through with a bullet in an easy manner like they were discussing the details of a random dare/argument inside the game of beer pong. 

You DO NOT get to tell me Steve ever made the choice, without a plan, or his team, or a mass collection of guns, to let four hostages go, even if they were all caught (but were mostly killed) before the end, because it was worth it for one hostage. And you DO NOT get to tell me he did not get arrested, stripped of his position or utterly reamed by Dennings for it. 

You don’t. Not to all of this. All of it was horrid. Wrong. Bad. Disgusting. 

And the “lolarious” shooting through someone is possible the most disgusted I’ve been with this show EVER. I mean EVER. I’ve never been as annoyed with the deaths and removal of the women, who at least were paid some due. Danny and Steve are nearly laughing at Steve being right about him shooting through a guy’s shoulder. Just. No. No. No. No. No. No. That is not okay on any level. Ever. Anywhere. 

Be prepared for me not to drop this gun-bullet-body-Danny-Steve scene anytime soon. I won’t be.

I could not stomach anything in the show or my own shock for a good five minutes. (HOW DID NO ONE SPOIL ME FOR THIS IN NEARLY A WEEK’S TIME SINCE THE SHOW WAS AIRED? DID NO ONE ELSE HAVE A PROBLEM WITH THIS?)

* 

3\. Catherine’s Radical Characterization Switch 

I just stared at the screen today in wide-eyed utter bafflement at the person they showed me as Catherine today. Who markedly had her hands tied, but not her feet, and was never tied do to a location or an object or another person. Who never once tried to fight back for her own sake. Who was conveniently kidnapped (by a tow truck she wasn’t even suspicious of), and then abandoned to wander like a waif in the woods. Excuse me. What? 

Let me quote Your Canon for you, to help you:

Who was it that fought off a person breaking into a house with Black-Widow like fighting skills, and ended that fight with a slam dunk with her feet and legs? Who was it that argued she’d been to Kabul and could hold her own with a SEAL? Who was it who travailed North Korea as a Perfect Duo and fought, rolling on her sides on rocky dirt roads, and holding a large semi-automatic rifle, while she had fractured/broken ribs that were “nothing?” 

Because I gotta tell you, that might be completely out of context for a Navy Intel Officer, but it’s glaringly in her canon now. And the girl on my screen today, simpered and screamed and walked around with a bruised cheek/artfully mussed up hair to show she’d been beaten, was all over the tear stained lashes and got to be saved by The Hero because she was The Helpless, Hapless, Damsel in Need of Rescue. 

This was not even a Navy Intel Officer with basic Self Defense training who simply got overpowered. 

(For god’s sake, Mary Ann knocked a tooth out of her kidnapper’s mouth and she’s nowhere near trained.)

And then? Five minutes later? 

Cath was in an even more improbable situation. She was given a large gun, she has no right to use, and the state of Hawaii and The Navy would not allow her to use. How many times can I tell you, loudly, quietly, plaintively, prostratingly — the military and the police do not work together. They refuse to after a very long history of several important things. And the fact they keep legitimizing her in this way, when her CO has absolutely no say in the State of Hawaii, is painful. 

They would not equip a military civilian with one of their guns, and they would not allow a military civil to take part in whatever they were doing at that point, and they definitely would not let the victim of a kidnapping, who’d been beaten up, do either of these things right after she’d been rescued from her helpless, ineveitable kidnapping.

This episode and number of ‘coincidental happenstances’ with ‘incoherent characterization’ are exactly why people can correctly claim that Catherine is a Mary Sue. Because she’s not even consistent to her own past exploits and history, while all the rules of the real world are being bent around her “because she’s just that awesome.” 

This is why people have a hard time giving her the chance she deserves, because the writing guts everyone’s hope for any consistency within her character, changing it up at every turn for the most cliche of moves/story pieces. 

Final Breakdown Thoughts

Cohesively (in every minute I’m trying not to be sick about what just got vomited up through Steve’s drastic character regression/assassination scene) this whole episode made me dizzy. I’m not inclined to watch it a second time to try to make sense of a plot line that didn’t make sense to me in the first place, and I had five days to be prepared for this show, with all of you lovely people spoiling me with great clip shots and talkings.

I still don’t see why are how the it makes sense the Wo Fat’s break-in, The Palace’s take-over, and Information on Adam link together well. Because they really don’t cohesively. There isn’t a story there, except that now we get even more cliffhangers about Kono & Adam in danger, we’ve one more proof Cath can’t take care of herself, and a reason to replace Danny’s car/the computer table. 

I’m in like Flynn for Adam, Kono, and Grover! Gimmie, gimmie, gimmie. But I have some issue with pretty much everyone else on main cast this episode for at least one or two very big things, even if it’s just supporting decision made by the top of the heap. I hope we continue to see as much of Max, Komekona, Toast, and already known-in-world characters this season over flashy, unnecessary guest appearances. 

I hope to high heaven we actually get word that Fong is ‘alive’ sometime soon. 

Doris, I’m meh about. I don’t want her to die, but she could swan off into the Asian Ocean and I’d be okay. 

I have drastic problem with incoherent characterization on the parts of Steve, Danny, and Catherine. All three of them were bastardized to the point of being non-recognizable aside from their actors in large parts of this episode. I have problems with Five-0/Chin, Duke and The HPD backing up all the choices Steve made in this episode, several of which would be sanctioned by absolutely no one from anywhere. 

Repeat after me: We do not make deals with terrorists. I promise you’ll find it in every rule, book and movie. 

I’m trying to care about whether Wo Fat and Steve are related, but the plot is so far played out a season later, making Steve look the furthest thing from smart about cottoning on to what’s going on around him. I hope they can just resolve that storyline without any more blundering, bluffing and putting it off for half a season. 

I think it’s an incredibly ballsey (or stupid, we’ve yet to see the fall out) move to retire the iconic car and the iconic historical nemesis, both without almost any fanfare or due paid to them. I want to be hopeful though, somehow. But I did say this season would make or break me. But it’s late and I need to get this out before it is tomorrow night and I’m somehow owing two different write-ups all at once. 

These are going to go at the bottom of every write-up to chart Important Count Number

Count of current storylines & Relative Episodes  
Steve: Wo Fat/Doris (4.01), Captain Grover (4.01)  
Danny: Gabby (4.01)  
Kono: Adam/Asia (4.01)  
Chin: Kono (4.01)

Mentions to keep an eye out for:  
Fong Watch:  
Kono Missing: 4.01  
Grace:  
Rachel/Stan/Charles:  
Malia:  
Mary Ann:  
Doris: 4.01  
Wo Fat: 4.01  
Governor Dennings


End file.
